The recent phone hacking scandal seems to have open the flood gates and accusations about Murdoch and his businesses are piling on. People who he once intimidated seem to be no longer so.
Here are a couple stories detaining his ability to influence government figures.
A snippte from Howard Kurtz: the troops regularly received marching orders. “For a long time the Clintons were targets,” he said. “You couldn’t get enough dirt on the Clintons. Then Bill Clinton made a rapprochement with Murdoch, sucked up to him in the run-up to Hillary running” for the Senate in 2000.
“Then one day it was, ‘You can’t write anything bad about the Clintons.’ We had to kill stuff all the time. It filtered down from Murdoch. In the meetings we’d be told, ‘No way, mate.’”
And Alex Massie: The tabloids prefer winners to losers. That was one reason that they soured on John Major and backed Blair. When Gordon Brown succeeded Blair, he attempted to curry favor with News International. His wife Sarah guest-edited an edition of the News of the World's magazine; and the Browns hosted Elisabeth Murdoch, Rupert's daughter, and Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of News International and onetime News of the World editor, at Chequers, the prime minister's country mansion.
And here's one of a member of the House of Lords - a movie producer - that has worked to limit Murdoch's influence:
Years ago this prodigal filmmaker gave up the business and, elevated to the House of Lords, took up two causes close to his heart: education and communications. When Rupert Murdoch announced his bid to take total control of BSkyB, the British satellite-TV giant, Lord Puttnam was among the first to see how menacing this move was to the diversity of media ownership in the U.K.
But in a political climate where prime ministers—of both the Labour and Tory persuasion—walked in fear of the whim of Rupert Murdoch and where so-called regulators moved the goalposts every time Murdoch found them in his path, raising a red flag against Murdoch’s empire was about as popular as proposing the abolition of the monarchy.
Nonetheless, David Puttnam has three qualities that come in handy when waging a campaign against overmighty barons: the ability to marshal an argument with irrefutable facts, to present them with passion—and a lack of fear about the consequences. As we now know in gruesome detail, opposing the Murdoch empire can attract some odious countermeasures.